


The Cracks in Our Masks

by hellsinki



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Dissociative Identity Disorder, Experimental Style, Heavy Angst, Julian needs lots of warm blankets people, M/M, allenbert may or may not be onesided, cuz we're inside Julian's messedup head, everything's so ambiguous here, pls donate, savitar may or may not be a perv, tag to 3x07, you get to decide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-29
Updated: 2016-11-29
Packaged: 2018-09-03 02:34:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8692999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellsinki/pseuds/hellsinki
Summary: 'Everything hurts and nothing makes sense and the wicked claws of fear are slowly sinking into his flesh. But Barry Allen is here and somehow that makes everything seem okay.'





	

You have always known, haven’t you? Somewhere at the far back of your mind, a little sizzling sound of boiling tissues and infected brain cells, a haunting whisper of ancient wounds, still open and bleeding inside your skull, filling you up to your eyeballs, until everything you look at is tinged crimson. You have always known where the blood stains on your hands came from. Did you decide to ignore it for convenience? Or was there another force of evil, far beyond your control, involved? I know you have been terrified. You have asked yourself many times if you had fought against it with all your might and lost, or had you just given up before the fight even began? Who holds the answers now? Do you trust your mind?

_‘Julian.’_

He wakes up to a staggering bolt of pain shooting through his scalp, as if his name has suddenly turned into a dagger, dragged mercilessly inside the soft, thick layer of his neural tissue. He sits up fast in pain, fear and confusion as the world outside swims before his eyes. He thinks, _I am in a hospital._

_‘Julian.’_

The second calling is almost shouted inside his head, more urgently and inviting more intense pain like a jab of electric shock in the back of his head that travels all the way down his neck and settles languidly in the hollow of his throat. He is suddenly gripped with  an acute fight or flight response as he takes into his surroundings: whitewash walls, the strong smell of disinfectants, the patterned drops of saline solution into the IV bag, alone and terrified, completely and utterly on his own.

_‘You can’t fight me, Julian.’_

No, he can’t. How do you fight an invisible force inside your head? How do you fight against yourself? Julian doesn’t know, so he flees instead.

“No. Stay away.”

He throws off the bed covers, and runs across the cold hospital floor on bare feet. A spell of dizziness hits him hard and sends him almost crashing into the wall but he manages to thrust his arm forward in time to prevent the fall.

_‘No, Julian. You can’t get away either.’_

He runs through the narrow corridor and doors that lead to even more corridors. He should feel the cold crawling up his legs and seeping through the open tears on his loose hospital gown; he should feel the pain shooting across his body every time his feet make contact with the ground; he should feel exhausted or uncomfortably high on pain medications. But his brain doesn’t register any of those feelings now.

He just feels terrified. So much so that he feels only a fraction of the tiniest misstep away from a cardiac arrest. He needs to get away. He needs to find somewhere safe and stay there curled up into himself until the voice goes away.

_‘There’s nowhere I won’t find you.’_

He has never been more scared of anything else in his life. That voice. The voice of God?

 

You have always been one of the chosen ones.

 

Somehow he finds himself out in the open, and the strong tidal wave of fear and confusion suddenly stops pressing incessantly against his mind. Suddenly all sounds and pressure fade out, as if he has been thrown into deep space. He isn’t scared anymore. He doesn’t feel anything. Is he dead?

_‘Julian.’_

This time, his name feels less like a dagger tearing through his flesh and more like a caress over his numbed senses, teasing not gentle, urgent not soothing, forceful but somehow without any of its previous bite. He looks up obediently, and he sees the face of God.

_‘Only together can we bring about my return.’_

He thinks about gentle rays of sun peeking through the blinds, of white pigeons picking at the ground on cold snowy mornings, of rainy afternoons in his hometown walking through muddied patches of green looking for insects to put inside his little jar. He thinks about the soft look in those dark green eyes as Julian tells him about his desire to help people, to improve the world. He thinks about the smile on Barry Allen’s lips as he accepts his offer to go out with him to a bar. He thinks about that little urge he gets every time Barry leans in close, that beautiful, intoxicating feeling of being thoroughly alive, before he blacks out.

 

“Julian? Julian, come on wake up. What are you doing here?”

He can’t yet open his eyes. He feels the hardness of the ground beneath his frigid body, and wills his hand to move upward, to where the familiar, comforting voice is coming from. _My guardian angel,_ he thinks almost sardonically, but somewhere deep inside his heart, he is truly relieved for hearing that voice right now.

“God, what happened? Why aren’t you back at your room? Are you hurt?”

His hand finally makes contact with something soft and warm, as it encloses him in its cocoon of safety. He feels hot puffs of breath brushing the cold side of his face, someone must be leaning very close to him. Someone with the soothing voice and warm hands. Someone who is concerned for his wellbeing. Julian’s heart gives a painful lurch inside his chest as he finally manages to force his eyes open.

Everything hurts and nothing makes sense and the wicked claws of fear are slowly sinking into his flesh. But Barry Allen is here and somehow that makes everything seem ok.

“Julian, are you hurt? Can you sit up?”

He can’t, but those arms slip under his elbows and encircle his back as if he is a precious little thing, easily breakable by the gentlest breeze. He does feel broken though. There is a yawning gap in his memory that keeps getting deeper the more he tries to bridge it. He is scared of falling into it. So he stops going anywhere near the edge.

“I’m...I’m fine,” his voice sounds raspy and unused, his throat dry and words a jumble of nonsensical notions inside his head.

“How long have you been lying here on the ground? God, you’re freezing.”

Barry quickly takes off his jacket and throws it around his shaking shoulders. There is something utterly affectionate and intimate in the way he wraps Julian up in his own article of clothing. Julian’s heart constricts painfully at the thought.

“Wh-what time…”, he rasps out. It is still dark. What is Barry doing here, back at the hospital?

“It’s almost three in the morning. Julian, you should be in your bed.” His eyes look at him with tenderness and concern, as if he truly cares about Julian being alright. If Julian asks him now, and he says no, Julian knows he’d lied. There is no way he is not in love.

“I...I passed out. Can’t remember...must have been the concussion.” But he knows that is not the case at all. What is it then? The chasm threatens to drag him down, so he quickly backs away for now.

“God, Julian, I’m so sorry,” he sounds truly wretched but Julian doesn’t understand what he is sorry for. He has come to his rescue, and Julian also finds himself slightly in love. And if Barry were to ask him now, he wouldn’t be able to lie.

“Come on, I’ll walk you back to your room.”

It feels good leaning against the taller man, with his throbbing head resting securely on his shoulder. He is cold, hurt and confused, but at least he is not scared anymore. And somehow that’s all that matters to him now.

“Allen...thank you for coming back for me.” he whispers into the crook of Barry’s neck, loving the soft smell on his warm skin.

The arm tightens around his shoulder protectively, “any time, Julian. Any time.”

He would have asked him then, if he wasn’t feeling so drowsy and numb. He would have asked him then and Barry too wouldn’t have been able to lie.

 

But in the morning, when the gentle rays of sun peek through the blinds, and turn the blond strands of your hair into gold, when you open your eyes to the emptiness of the hospital room and shiver under the bed covers, cold from the inside, Barry Allen is not there to greet you with one of those hopeful, open smiles. He is no longer at the lab either, or the entire precinct when you go back to work after a few days of bed rest in the hospital. You wonder if Barry had ever been there that night, wrapping you in his jacket and holding you close all the way to your hospital room. You would have asked him if you weren’t sure that he’d lie. Instead, you just hold onto his jacket and pretend that he is still there with you every time you close your eyes.

It keeps getting scarier to fall asleep at night.

_‘Julian.’_

**Author's Note:**

> To clear things up, Julian doesn't just pass out there in the hospital yard. He blacks out and becomes Alchemy who then goes to do whatever Savitar has asked him to do. As for what Barry was doing there late at night, he either felt so guilty over having given Julian a concussion that he couldn't sleep so he decided to go to the hospital to secretly check on Julian? Or he could have been running after Alchemy when Savitar showed up to distract him while Alchemy took off his costume at the lab and returned to hospital as Julian. Barry could have been making rounds around the hospital near where he last sighted Alchemy when he finds Julian lying on the ground :) Julian's head is so messed-up that i couldn't just put all this information there in the story xD  
> Soundtrack to this fic: 'I Ran (So Far Away)' covered by Hidden Citizens


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